by Harry BuererGod has a personal name. The terms “God” and “Lord” are simply descriptions. When I was growing up and mostly a reader of the King James Bible, I thought that this personal name was “Jehovah”. It wasn’t until I got to seminary that I discovered that this wasn’t even a word, much less a name. But more about that later.
In order to discuss this topic, we need to realize some things about the Hebrew language. The language has been around for about 4000 years, but until about a thousand years ago, it was written with only consonants. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is a consonant. When the language was spoken, you could hear the vowels, but only the consonants were written down. Native speakers understood what vowels were to be used in various words. In the middle ages a group of scholars, the Masoretes, developed a system for identifying vowels in and around the letters by using various dots and lines. This will be significant later.
When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3, he told him to tell the Israelites that his name was “Ehyeh”, which translates as “I am” or “I will be”. In the next sentence God gave Moses a different name, that he said would be his name forever. That name is the one that is most commonly recorded throughout the Hebrew Bible.
This name that God gave Moses is composed of four letters in Hebrew. It is sometimes referred to as the tetragrammaton (four letters). The first letter is the “yodh”, which is equivalent to the ‘Y’ sound in English (not a ‘J’) as we saw in last week’s post. The second and fourth letters are both a “hey”, which sounds like the English letter ‘H’. The third letter is one that has varied in sound over the years. In older times it was apparently pronounced as a “W”, but in more recent times and in modern Hebrew is usually pronounced as a ‘V’. So putting them all together, we get a series of consonants: YHWH or YHVH.
Sometime before the second temple period, the time of Jesus, Jewish tradition had decided that, based on the command not to take God’s name in vain (Exodus 20:7), it would be better not to speak this name at all. The custom became that when reading the biblical text in Hebrew, when you encountered the divine name, you would say “Adonai”, the Hebrew word for “Lord”. In order to remind readers of this, when the Masoretes added vowels to the text, they used the vowels of “Adonai” inserted into the tetragrammaton. This isn’t really pronounceable, but if you try, it comes out something like “Yehovah”. That’s how we get that word, the consonants of one word with the vowels of another.
This is well-known in Jewish circles, but there is another strong piece of evidence for it. When the divine name occurs in the Hebrew text alongside the actual word “Adonai”, then the divine name is to be pronounced “Elohim”, the Hebrew word for “God”. In these cases the Masoretes put the vowels for “Elohim” around the tetragrammaton. Trying to pronounce it as written would come out something like “Yehovee”.
When referring to the divine name in English, Jews will typically use an “evasive synonym”. Sometimes it will be “HaShem”, which is Hebrew for “the name”. Sometimes they will say “Almighty” or “heaven” or something else. It’s interesting that in the New Testament gospels where Luke refers to the “kingdom of God”, Matthew refers to the “kingdom of heaven”. This may be a similar evasive synonym.
In most of our English translations, when the divine name occurs, it is rendered as “LORD” in all capital letters. This is to represent the Hebrew pronunciation of “Adonai”. In the rare places where the divine name occurs alongside the real Hebrew word “Adonai”, the name will be rendered as “GOD” in all capitals. This is to represent the Hebrew pronunciation of “Elohim”. This is what happens in the King James translation. Others may represent it in other ways, such as “Sovereign LORD”. This particular structure happens a lot in Ezekiel (e.g. Ezekiel 3:11; 4:14).
Some scholars have decided that they know how the name was pronounced, and they write it out and encourage people to say it. As far as I am concerned, any pronunciation is only a guess. We can be pretty sure that the first part is pronounced “Yah”, as that word occurs alone as a short form of the name (e.g. Psalm 122:4), as well as in names of individuals (e.g. Abijah, Adonijah, Elijah) and the compound word “Hallelujah” (Hebrew for “Praise Yah”). But any vowels that might be included in the remainder of the name are totally unknown.
Should we try to pronounce the name? As I see it, our best example in this regard is Jesus, and there is no indication in the gospels that he ever pronounced the name. It would have been unacceptable in his Jewish context, but if the name was intended to be pronounced, it seems that he would have taught regarding that. And the example of Jesus is good enough for me.